I am helping a friend installing debain on a laptop with a backpack cdrom, and have some trouble. (A compaq thing, 486/75 with 16M ram & 500 or so of harddisk)
The 2.0 install floppy was used for partitioning the disk, but it couldn't see the backpack cdrom. So I compiled a 2.2.2 kernel. This one autodetects the backpack cdrom at bootup, but it fails mysteriously, believing that there is no harddisk! Yes - the driver for the ide disk is in place. And I can press alt+F2 and mount /dev/hda1 just fine and access the empty partition waiting for installation. I can run cfdisk too - no problem. But the install program stubbornly insist that there is no harddisk, so it won't even let me try partitioning or use the swap partition. Needless to say, the install stop there. Does the install program depend on some particular kernel feature for discovering the disk, beside the driver that work already? I tried enabling the automounter - that didn't help. Is there anything else that must (or must not) be configured? Helge Hafting
